WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR POETRY 2019Ada Limon is a poet of ecstatic revelation . . . a book of deep wisdom and urgent vulnerability’ Tracy K. Smith, Guardian’Vulnerable, tender, acute . . . The Carrying is a gift’ Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and former US Poet Laureate’Exquisite poems’ Roxane GayFrom National Book Critics Circle Award Winner Ada Limon comes The Carrying – her most powerful collection yet. Vulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the grace of acceptance. A daughter tends to aging parents. A woman struggles with infertility – ‘What if, instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry grief?’ – and a body seized by pain and vertigo as well as ecstasy. A nation convulses: ‘Every song of this country / has an unsung third stanza, something brutal.’ And still Limon shows us, as ever, the